Page 32 of Orc’s Bones

No bravado in it. Already past the moment of deciding.

He was still for a second longer than he needed to be. Then he turned and started down.

She came with him — not behind him, beside him, matching his pace in the passage with the ease of someone who’d been doing it her whole life.

Don’t think about that.

The passage to the lower levels was carved from the same black basalt as the Crypt corridors above it, but at this depth the stone was different — older, denser, the stone accumulated over a period that made the upper Crypt tiers feel recent. The ghostfire lanterns ran at intervals rather than continuously, so their descent was punctuated by pools of light and stretches of near-dark where the bone-ink in his forearms warmed without him consciously calling on it.

She tracked it. Not staring at his arms — a peripheral awareness, the attention she brought to everything she read. Reading the heat in his forearms without looking directly at them, the same way she’d read the bone structures in the Archive walls.

He noticed her noticing.

Neither of them commented on it.

Her voice dropped — not acoustics, caution.

“When we reach the founding chamber, I need five uninterrupted minutes to place the first anchor point. If Malverek is present, I need you to hold him off for five minutes.”

“I can do that.”

“He’s a revenant. He won’t die the way a living man dies. The construct in the mid-level chamber was made from the same binding structure that holds him in place. You found the anchor point on that construct by instinct. You’ll need to do it deliberately this time.”

“I read the resonance that held the construct in place and followed it to its source.”

“Correct. In Malverek, that source is in the sternum. He moved it after the construct was destroyed — the sternum is the most stable location for a binding anchor in a body that’s been rebuilt rather than grown. I can’t guarantee he hasn’t moved it again.”

“Can you tell me if he has.”

“From range, yes. I’ll read his binding structure when we’re in the same room. I’ll tell you where it is before you need to move.”

She was going to be placing anchor points with both hands, reading Malverek’s structure at the same time, navigating a chamber that had been modified by months of his active work. Another person, he’d ask if she was certain. He didn’t ask her.

“When you’re reading him, are you readable back.”

She weighed it. “If he’s paying attention to me rather than you, yes.”

“So I keep his attention.”

“That’s the plan.”

The passage leveled briefly at the mid-level junction — the chamber where the first construct had assembled, the door sealed and guarded — and then descended again, steeper, the founding tier’s weight pressing outward from the stone, thick enough that Thruk felt it in his chest cavity.

“It’s stronger than I expected,” she said as they descended. “He’s already integrated the outer ring.”

“How close to complete.”

“Close. If we don’t anchor the barrier in the next few hours, the array will be fully operational.”

“Then we move faster.”

“Faster and careful are not the same obstacle.”

He didn’t answer that. She wasn’t wrong.

They descended another fifty meters, the passage narrowing, the black basalt giving way to stone so old it had lost the carved precision of the upper levels and showed its raw form — the Dominion’s oldest foundation layer, the bones of the city in the most literal sense, alcoves that hadn’t been touched in centuries.

The founding chamber entrance was ahead.